After our weekly meeting yesterday (every Tuesday at 7:30, open to the general public, if you didn't already know) we decided on an impromptu Hackathon this weekend.

While this is not the same as the Synchronous Hackathon that is held every third weekend of the month, we will still be streaming live on ustream.tv while working on a variety of projects.

We encourage any other hackerspaces that feel up to a little impromptu hacking to have at it with us. If you are so inclined, go ahead and contact us and we'll put up the link to your ustream.tv along with ours.

As always, non-members and curious parties are welcomed, and encouraged to attend, get a tour of the space, work on projects or just generally be in good company.

The number of scanners we can't, won't, or don't use at Freeside continues to grow, while the demand for stepper motors and controllers also grows. These two problems suggest a mutual solution, which I approached with gusto today. Follow through the process after the jump, click through to flickr for more details and notes.

Well another year, another Shmoocon. For those who are unfamiliar with Shmoocon, it's a medium sized hacker convention in Washington DC that is held at the beginning of the year. The big change this year is that DC had a record breaking snowfall of around 3 ft. This certainty made getting around for food a challenge. While many people didn't make it, the other new cool thing is that they streamed all the live talks to UStream. This year, one of the best talks was Freesides and DC404's own Taylor Banks and Adam Bregenzers "Becoming Jack Flack: Real Life Cloak & Dagger" The room was quite packed from front to back at 10:00am Sunday presentation. This was especially amazing as the previous night was the open bar party.

Another talk I really enjoyed was:

Most of this talk was based off of things you can learn on DIYdrones.com . However it was really nice to hear someone talk about it in person and show footage recorded from a Drone they flew over the hotel in bad weather the day before. I was quite impressed. I am convinced now that this is going to be my project. UAV's flying around the Atlanta Metropolitan Warehouses just seems like a fun idea.

Here are some more pics from Shmoocon:To the left is one of the famous competitions at Shmoocon, the Shmooball launcher. This puppy here used an RD feed with video and targeting system and launched a Shmooball faster than an eye can see. While Shmooballs are very soft this thing will leave a bruise.